When Are the Intelligent Aliens?
blogs.discovermagazine.com
When Are the Intelligent Aliens?
1–10 of 102 posts
Re: When Are the Intelligent Aliens?
#2Considering how many life forms are on this planet, and how few of them who provide decent conversation, what are the chances of discovering Vulcans or Wookies? Most life we eventually discover might be more exciting to entomologists.
Re: When Are the Intelligent Aliens?
#3Perhaps the emergence of life itself is The Great Filter. I hope it is.
Re: When Are the Intelligent Aliens?
#4I have no doubt that there is other intelligent life somewhere in the universe. That said, with the vast distances involved, I suspect that we will never encounter them.
Re: When Are the Intelligent Aliens?
#5So we are getting close to the possibility of detecting (with some kind of specrometry) an exoplanet with an atmosphere with a chemical composition that is far from thermodynamical equilibrium.
It would be a thrilling feeling to know that there, maybe 20 or 100 light-years away, is such a planet, hosting at least microbial or algal life.
Re: When Are the Intelligent Aliens?
#6Intelligence may not be adaptive from the gene perspective. One can see a large number of plausible reasons this might be the case by observing human society and humanity as a whole. If it is in fact true, appearances of that trait would likely be rare and short lived across the universe.
Re: When Are the Intelligent Aliens?
#7[deleted]
Re: When Are the Intelligent Aliens?
#8The way I view it, by definition someone has to be first.
We just don't know enough about all the variables, such as noted by others in this discussion the probability of evolving to sentience, to state with any confidence that we can't be the first in our galaxy or the portion of it that we're looking at.
Re: When Are the Intelligent Aliens?
#9So we are getting close to the possibility of detecting (with some kind of specrometry) an exoplanet with an atmosphere with a chemical composition that is far from thermodynamical equilibrium. It would be a thrilling feeling to know that there, maybe 20 or 100 light-years away, is such a planet, hosting at least microbial or algal life.
I'm not convinced we know enough to do this. A planet in the right temperature with a high-oxygen atmosphere might just be low-carbon and high pH, such that the entire surface is oxidized and glassy and the liquid water carries a pH in the 12s.
What's great is, we're about to get a whole lot more data with which to do astrochemistry.
Re: When Are the Intelligent Aliens?
#10Intelligence may not be adaptive from the gene perspective. One can see a large number of plausible reasons this might be the case by observing human society and humanity as a whole. If it is in fact true, appearances of that trait would likely be rare and short lived across the universe.
Intelegence is clearly adaptive when you consider humans have the widest habitat range of any multicellular organism on the planet. When you consider people where thriving in Alaska at the end of the last ice age the idea that climate change or industrial pollution is going to do us in is overblown. A full scale nuclear exchange may doom modern civilization but modern civilization showed up fairly quickly after modern humans evolved. The only real man made threat would be some sort of perfect disease designed to kill everyone an even a that is likely to fail.